Top ideas and decisions to consider when starting a project as a beginner dev or startup team

[maggiechu26]

Details

When a beginner wants to start to develop an idea into a working app, they lack the knowledge and experience in order to choose the app stack. That creates a lot of developer debts down the road and possibly even refactoring big parts (if not all) of the project. Developer debt and refactoring are big friction generators that can halt or completely stop the development of an idea. There are TONS of options to choose from in the sea of the development ecosystem, it becomes overwhelming and can cause decision fatigue or create the misleading appearance that you have to learn too much in order to make those decisions.

• How to determine priorities for each project and know where to stop to avoid getting into a rabbit hole of spending too much time on things that down the road we see were not as important.
• How to identify strengths and divide tasks between team members.

Suggested by

Santiago Forero Molano - Github, Linkedin, Codementor Profile

• This topic doesn’t have a set speaker yet, so feel free to leave a comment if you want to give a talk on this topic or if you have recommended speakers!

Questions

• What else would you like to know about this topic?
• What would you want to take away from this talk?
• Would you prefer to get a general overview of the topic or receive more in-depth information and use-cases?

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2. Leave a comment to:
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   • Or simply give some encouragement to the speaker! ✨

[Michael-Ackerman3956]

As a beginner developer working on my first iOS app to launch, responses to this question would be very useful. I mean, some beginner developers myself, would design and develop the app at the same time, and we learn "along the way". Because we would have improved a lot by the time we have built significant portion of the app, we would look back the earlier part of app that we worked on while we were still "learning" and think of re-doing the entire set of them, just because we learn more best practices along the way.

Personally, I think it could have been avoided if I had a mentor who would review all of my app's requirements and breakdown every single part of the app that needs to be developed in a "roadmap" like format. Perhaps, a blue print that outlines all the best practices and framework that the beginner should adopt must have been set from the start.

[tc6899]

Hi! A couple of years ago I naively assumed learning 'the internet' would be easyish after coding on and off for most of my life from the age of 8, and from doing a PhD in computational chemistry/physics. However, I had no idea how fractured each of the layers had become, and how many competing technologies there were. It took me AGES to get to grips with it, and in the end, I hired a developer on here to help me learn react and to make sure what I had learned from websites and videos was correct. I think an overview of the whole architecture of the web would be really useful for new people. Most of what I read was people arguing about X vs Y. Anything else was simply overwhelming. It was like trying to learn to speak French by reading a university-level textbook on philosophy. Maybe a website that outlines current technologies - what they do, what problem they solve, example use cases. Then a summary of current technologies for each problem.

What else would you like to know about this topic?
Have I missed a site that explains the current solutions in a brief unbiased way?

What would you want to take away from this talk?
The easiest way to quickly keep up with developments without getting pulled left then right.

Would you prefer to get a general overview of the topic or receive more in-depth information and use-cases?
I think examples with use cases would be the best idea. An outline of how a new person could make a decision that is good enough, and how far to go before making a pivot decision.

Sorry if I sound all over the place - I really struggled here, and I don't think there is an easy fix. if you can shed any light that would be amazing. Thanks!!!